Terry Bisson, the sci-fi and fantasy writer who wrote the 1990 award-winning short story, “Bears Discover Fire,” as well as “They’re Made Out of Meat,” passed away on January 10 at age 81.
Bisson was born on February 12, 1942 and grew up in Kentucky, which ultimately became the setting for “Bears Discovers Fire,” which won the Nebula, Hugo, Sturgeon, and Locus award for that year.
Bisson’s first novel, Wylrdmaker, was published in 1981. He went on to publish several additional novels, with the last one, Any Day Now, coming out in 2012. He also wrote several books set in popular franchises—such as 2002’s Star Wars: Boba Fett: The Fight to Survive and the novelizations of The Fifth Element and Galaxy Quest. He also wrote a series of NASCAR children’s books under the pen name T.B. Calhoun.
Bisson was primarily known, however, for his short stories, and for writing Locus magazine’s “This Month in History” series, the latter of which ran for over two decades. In “This Month in History”, he would write two-to-three sentence entries about an event happening at some specific date in the future. Over the years he wrote over a thousand future histories. His work and his life was also chronicled in an October 2023 profile in The New Yorker.
In 1962 he married Deirde Holst and had two sons and a daughter with her. They divorced in 1966 and went on to live in New York and then in various communes before returning to New York in 1975, where he served as editor and copy chief at Berkley and Ace until 1985. During that time he married Judy Jensen, with whom he raised two daughters and a son. The couple moved to San Francisco in 2002, where he started the reading series “SF in SF.”
Bisson his survived by his wife, Judy, as well as his children and grandchildren.
